Ruth Perry (email: rperry@mit.edu),
JASNA’s 2009 Carol Medine Moss Keynote Lecturerer, is a
professor at MIT, founding director of the MIT Women’s Studies
program, and past president of the American Society for
Eighteenth-Century Studies. She recently (with Susan Carlile)
edited Charlotte Lennox’s Henrietta.
Her current project is a biography of Anna Gordon Brown (1747-1810),
a Scotswoman whose ballad repertoire was the first collected from a
living person.

The
eighteenth century saw a quiet revolution in the structure of
kinship. The family of origin, the consanguineal family, the
family you were born into, lost ground to the family that was created
by marriage, the conjugal family. The ties among blood kin
began to weaken and the bonds created by marriage grew stronger.
More people married than ever before and fewer stayed single, because
the family that increasingly mattered was the new family constructed
by marriage rather than the family of parents and siblings that one
grew up in (Perry 1-5, 14-15, 29-34, passim).1

This
happened gradually throughout the eighteenth century, for a number of
social and economic reasons: greater geographical mobility
meant that adult children no longer lived their lives out in the
vicinity of their parents. The growth of cities and the new
possibilities for ways of earning a living drew young people from the
agricultural countryside into urban and proto-industrial centers.
Class mobility meant that children no longer shared the economic
circumstances of their parents—no longer were dependent on them
for land and tools—nor for permission or guidance in their
marriage choices (Perry 24-29). And as English society became
increasingly enmeshed in a cash-and-credit based capitalist economy,
marriage itself became one of the most significant means of moving
capital around, of transferring it from one family to another, and of
consolidating larger estates and fortunes (Perry 209-17).

Although
marriage settlements had functioned from the sixteenth through the
early eighteenth century to protect women’s financial interest
in marriage, by the early eighteenth century marriage settlements
were being turned to a different use—to concentrate and entail
property in the male line. The strict settlement, a legal
device invented in the late seventeenth century and added to marriage
contracts, designated provisions for the as yet unborn children of
the coming union, insuring that the property jointly owned by the new
couple would be entailed on male offspring born to them. It
limited what, out of the estate, would be left to daughters and
younger sons, focusing future inheritance on accumulation rather than
distribution of a family’s wealth (Perry 49).

These
processes are complex and they are not my subject here, although I
wanted to gesture towards the reasons for this dramatic shift in the
meaning of kinship and family. Suffice it to say that marriage
gained both economic and social significance in England in the course
of the eighteenth century. Men and women began to marry two
years younger on average than they had in earlier times—women
at twenty-three and men at twenty-five—and fewer people
remained unmarried than ever before. And the birthrate
climbed. After a century of population stability during which
the population hovered around the five-million mark, it nearly
doubled in the course of the century. By the early nineteenth
century, when Jane Austen began publishing her books, the population
of England was nearly nine million.

So what
has this to do with brothers and sisters? Simply this:
that as the consanguineal family—the family you were born into,
your blood kin—lost significance and the conjugal and affinal
family—that is, the new configuration of family you created by
marrying—gained significance, women became less important as
daughters and as sisters and became more important, socially and
culturally speaking, as mothers and wives. Their claims on the
resources of their families as wives and as mothers gained legal and
social credibility while their claims as daughters and as sisters
were diminished accordingly.

This
re-assigning of the priorities of women’s familial roles is
visible in a great deal of eighteenth-century fiction in contests
between sisters and wives for the resources and affection of the man
who was the brother to one and the husband to the other. Jane
Austen, who keenly felt her place in her family both as a sister and
a daughter, and who never married and hence was never called upon to
reassign these loyalties to a new conjugal family—nor to
compete with a husband’s sisters for his love and
support—dramatized this conflict acutely in that remarkable
second chapter of Sense and Sensibility in which Mr. John
Dashwood is convinced by his selfish wife to disregard the deathbed
vow that he made to his father to protect and support his stepmother
and sisters. Austen is always aware of what a man owes his
sisters—his consanguineal family—and this scene is a good
example of this concern.

The
sequence begins with the land itself, the estate of Norland,
inhabited at the outset by a single man and his constant companion
and housekeeper, his sister. When this sister dies in the
opening chapter, the old gentleman invites his nephew—presumably
a sibling’s child—Mr. Henry Dashwood, together with his
wife and daughters, to live with him. The estate is to pass to
Henry Dashwood after the old gentleman dies, and then to Henry
Dashwood’s son by a previous marriage, John Dashwood, although
it was Henry Dashwood’s second wife—our Mrs.
Dashwood—and their three daughterswho
enlivened the old gentleman’s last decade. Henry Dashwood
dies a year after his uncle, although not before urging his son John
to look after the interests of his stepmother and sisters.
Norland is duly inherited by his son John, bypassing the female
protagonists—Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters Elinor, Marianne,
and Margaret—who will inherit no land.

Thus
Austen sets up an opposition between John Dashwood’s obligation
to his conjugal family, his wife and child, and his duty to his
consanguineal family, his blood kin—already somewhat attenuated
by their being only a stepmother and half sisters. Norland,
once the site of a family constructed by siblinghood—where the
old gentleman lived with his sister—has become the private
domain of a nuclear family, and John Dashwood’s wife makes his
stepmother and sisters feel unwelcome in what had been their home.
They are “degraded” to the condition of visitors; their
claims as consanguineal kin are very much secondary to hers as a
conjugal spouse.

Next we
watch her whittle away her husband’s intended largesse to his
blood kin of £1,000 apiece to £500 apiece to an annuity
of £100 per annum for his stepmother to an occasional gift of
£50 to presents of game or fish in season. Their dialogue
is punctuated by venal remarks on Mrs. Dashwood’s good health
and probable longevity and reflections on their toddler son’s
adult requirements and necessities in excess of the income of more
than £4,000 a year that he already stands to inherit (9-12).

Austen
plays this scene for laughs, but when one considers that the reduced
income of the Dashwood women was probably about what she and
Cassandra and their mother had to live on after George Austen died,
and that this income was partly constituted by the contributions of
Austen’s brothers and Cassandra’s annuity, the
calculations of this comic scene take on more of an edge (Le Faye
146-147). John Dashwood’s selfishness in the face of his
sisters’ need becomes less theoretical.

When
Emma Watson—in Jane Austen’s fragment, The
Watsons—returns home to her father and sisters in Surry
after living with her wealthy aunt and uncle in Shropshire, becoming
again a dependent daughter instead of a potential heiress, a
contender in the marriage market—her reduced status is apparent
to everyone. Her brother greets her casually after many years’
absence, thus underscoring her present insignificance: “Robert
was carelessly kind, as became a prosperous Man & a brother; more
intent on settling with the Post-Boy, inveighing against the
Exorbitant advance in Posting, & pondering over a doubtful
halfcrown, than on welcoming a Sister, who was no longer likely to
have any property for him to get the direction of” (349).
Without the expectation of a fortune from her aunt and uncle, her
importance in her family of origin is minimal; she has nothing to
interest her brother Robert and is only another mouth to feed,
another sister to marry off. Like Charlotte Lucas before Mr.
Collins’s saving proposal, an unmarried sister was a burden to
her brothers.

Up until
the eighteenth-century, brothers were expected to protect their
sisters—because they were the representatives of patriarchal
power under the older, feudal system, and then later, because they
were participants in the newer capitalist system. Changes in
English class structure and the nature of inheritance enhanced the
privilege of male children. As men, they could hope for
advancement or class mobility; they could have careers and handle
money; they could go into trade or travel to the East or West Indies,
train for the clergy, or join the navy. Men engaged in the
business of the world; women did not. In Persuasion,
Mrs. Smith is unable to claim her West Indian property until she gets
help from Captain Wentworth, who “writ[es] for her, act[s] for
her, and see[s] her through all the petty difficulties of the case”
(251). Jane Austen’s brothers managed negotiations with
publishers for her, although not always as deftly as she might have
done herself. Robert Watson would have managed his sisters’
property had there been any to manage, and his lukewarm welcome can
be traced to this unfortunate lack.

Sisters
depended on their brothers for financial support and occasionally for
an establishment. They relied on their brothers for legal
advice and public negotiation, for mobility and escorted travel, for
social and sexual protection. Whenever Jane Austen wants to
travel somewhere, as you can see from her letters—to London or
to Kent—she has to wait for one of her brothers to take her.
Men moved more easily in the world; they could carry weapons for
self-defense, and their economic resources were usually greater than
sisters of whatever age. Especially if there was no father,
brothers were supposed to protect and look after their sisters’
interests; it was a vestigial obligation from an earlier time
increasingly honored in the breach rather than in the observance.

The
problem was that despite their social and economic dependence,
sisters had no legal leverage to compel this protection and these
services from their brothers because theirs was, after all, a sibling
relation and not a child-parent relation. Brothers had very
little motivation other than conventional humanitarian reasons, or
old-fashioned sentiments about family honor, to arrange for their
sisters’ comfort—when their money might instead be spent
on their own business or pleasure. Moreover, as I have said,
once a man married, he increasingly felt that he owed his duty to his
conjugal family—his wife and children—in preference to
his consanguineal family of origin—his parents and his
siblings. Despite the convention that brothers, in the absence
of fathers, were responsible for their sisters, there was very little
economic incentive for them to take this responsibility seriously.
Many brothers must have viewed their sisters as responsibilities they
never chose, rivals for family resources, and a debt to the future,
occasion for both resentment and guilt.

It was
therefore unfortunate that, after her father, there was no one on
whom an unmarried woman depended more for her welfare and reputation
than her brother. He stood in the place of a parent, but with
none of the incentives of a parent for pride or generosity. In
families with property, the need to provide daughters with dowries
created further tension between brothers and sisters because it was
from his inheritance that her portion was to be subtracted.
Good brothers in fiction paid this debt willingly and even augmented
it; bad brothers tried to evade it.

In the
context of this somewhat outmoded moral code with regard to dependent
sisters, the extent to which brothers voluntarily undertook to
protect and to care for their sisters became a measure of their moral
fiber. Emma Watson’s brother, Robert, “carelessly
kind, as became a prosperous Man & a brother,” is morally
suspect from the start, a judgment in which the reader is confirmed
by his subsequent behavior. Although Austen suggests that his
lack of consideration is common enough in this scene in which he pays
more attention to “a doubtful half crown” than to a
sister he has not seen for years, it exposes his selfish heart just
as convincingly as the sequence revealing John Dashwood’s
heartlessness in the scene with his venal wife. The degree to
which a brother exhibited his care and concern for his sister is a
moral litmus test in eighteenth-century fiction, a convention for
reading a man’s real character. Although not required by
law, brotherly love had the weight of custom as well as necessity
behind it. A family obligation from an earlier era, it came to
be idealized in fiction as it was eroded in life by competing demands
of conjugal families and the cash requirements of the new economy.

In Pride
and Prejudice, when Mrs. Reynolds, the housekeeper, shows
Elizabeth Bennet and the Gardiners around the rooms at Pemberley and
praises Darcy’s treatment of his sister, it is a very telling
tribute given the novel conventions of the period. “‘Whatever
can give his sister any pleasure, is sure to be done in a moment,’”
she tells them. “‘There is nothing he would not do
for her’” (250). This endorsement is even more
powerful than her assurance that she has never had a cross word from
him or that he is very kind to his tenants, for it reveals the
strength of his affection as well as his sense of duty.

It is
noteworthy that the first thing the exemplary Sir Charles Grandison
does upon returning home after his father’s death, in
Richardson’s novel, is to restore his sisters’ rightful
portions. As Sir Charles’ mother explains to them on her
deathbed, a lesson that many wise older women articulate in
eighteenth-century fiction,

I am afraid there will be but a slender provision made for my dear
girls. Your papa has the notion riveted in him which is common
to men of antient families, that daughters are but incumbrances, and
that the son is to be everything. . . . Your brother loves
you: He loves me. It will be in his power, should
he survive your father, to be a good friend to you.—Love your
brother. (315)

Richardson
was, of course, one of Austen’s favorite writers. When
Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey assumes that Catherine
Morland’s mother disapproves of novels, Catherine replies,
“‘No, she does not. She very often reads Sir
Charles Grandison herself’” (41). But it is hardly
in Richardson’s novel alone that one finds such examples.
Most of the significant novels before Austen—whether by Eliza
Haywood, Mary Collyer, Sarah Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias
Smollett, Elizabeth Hamilton, or Sarah Scott—reveal the moral
qualities of their male protagonists by how they treat their
sisters. “Cherchez la soeur” ought to be a critic’s
first rule in judging a man in eighteenth-century novel. When
Grandison, the perfect hero, acts immediately upon his father’s
death to give his sisters what is due them by custom, it is not
simply the impulse to protect innocent sufferers that motivates him,
but a clear instinct for justice: he is not acting out of
charity but out of rectitude. He acts quickly and decisively to
make them comfortable and independent, giving them each £10,000
irrevocably free and clear. One assumes from the complex and
detailed circumstances—narrated with care and at great
length—that eighteenth-century readers found much of interest
in this example of how Grandison legally provided for his unmarried
sisters. Similarly, in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor
House, the idealized Orlando gives each of his sisters £5,000
as soon as he comes into his long-delayed estate (521).

When Mr.
Knightley expostulates on Mr. Martin’s fine qualities to Emma,
before he hears her prejudice against him as a match for her new
friend Harriet Smith, he says “‘He is an excellent young
man, both as a son and a brother’” (59). In other
words, Mr. Martin conforms to the highest expectations for young men
in the modern world. And Charles Musgrove, in Persuasion,
during the autumnal walk to Winthrop, where his cousin Charles Hayter
lives, agrees with his sisters’ decision to visit these
déclassé cousins—as Henrietta clearly wishes to
do—rather than to turn back and omit the visit as his snobbish
wife enjoins him to do. It is a minor incident, but a
contemporary novel reader would understand implicitly that his heart
is in the right place for supporting his sister rather than his
wife. And later, when Louisa falls on the Cobb at Lyme, he
hangs over her “with sobs of grief” for, as Austen tells
us, he was “really a very affectionate brother” (110).

Northanger
Abbey, with its array of brothers, perhaps displays most
systematically Austen’s treatment of brotherly love as an
important moral diagnostic. Henry Tilney, about whom we know
precious little at first except that he is a tease, qualifies as the
hero in the course of the novel by showing that he is an affectionate
brother. In the very first scene, he boasts his expertise in
muslin by telling Mrs. Allen that his sister “‘has often
trusted me in the choice of a gown’” and proceeds to
quote a price of five shillings a yard for a “‘true
Indian muslin’” to prove it. Mrs. Allen, who cares
about little else, is “struck by his genius” (28).
Now whether or not he is telling the truth about buying muslin at
this price, the fact that he knows what a good price is and seems
comfortable with the details of women’s dress would seem to
indicate that he is in his sister’s confidence.

Indeed,
all the brothers in Northanger Abbey display their truest
selves in relation to their sisters, as one might have expected in a
novel self-conscious about the conventions and clichés of
fiction. John Thorpe’s swaggering selfishness is apparent
from his first insolent greeting of his mother and sisters.
After boasting about his horses and his gig, the only subjects on
which he has anything to say, and offering to drive Catherine around,
he assures Isabella that “‘I did not come to Bath to
drive my sisters about’” (48). After that, and his
“short decisive sentence[s] of praise or condemnation on the
face of every woman they met,” he further distinguishes his
character by assuring Catherine that he never reads novels, which are
“‘the stupidest thing in creation’” (48).
His address to his mother and sisters is equally engaging: “‘Ah
mother! How do you do. . . . [W]here did you get that quiz
of a hat, it makes you look like an old witch,’” he says
to his mother, and then he “bestow[s] an equal portion of his
fraternal tenderness” on his two younger sisters by observing
how ugly they looked (49). He repeats at least one of these
endearing sentiments a week later, word for word, when Isabella tries
to convince Catherine to go with them to Clifton. She refuses
to go, being pre-engaged to the Tilneys, and suggests that they take
one of the younger Thorpe sisters in her stead, to which John replies
graciously, “‘Thank ye, . . . but I did not
come to Bath to drive my sisters about, and look like a fool”
(99). He does, in the end, resign himself to taking Maria, whom
he says he chose because Anne “‘had such thick ankces’”
(117)—an explanation not calculated to improve family relations
and sisterly affection. John neither protects, supports,
instructs, advises, nor in any way empathizes with his sisters; his
boorishness towards them is of a piece with the rest of his behavior.

Henry
Tilney, by comparison a loving and companionable brother, talks
things over with his sister Eleanor, reads novels with her, educates
her, and tries to keep her company as much as his duties at Woodston
allow. “‘I am always sorry to leave Eleanor,’”
he tells Catherine, aware of how lonely life must be for her, immured
at Northanger Abbey (157). Their older brother, Captain
Frederick Tilney, on the other hand, chafes under familial obligation
much as he resists any responsibility in his flirtation with Isabella
Thorpe. “‘How glad I shall be when you are all
off’” (155), he whispers to Eleanor as they prepare to
leave Bath and return to Northanger. The contrast tells the
reader at once which is the good brother and which the bad brother,
even without Austen’s hints about Captain Tilney’s gothic
potential.

Eleanor
Tilney trusts her brother Henry and confides in him. During the
éclaircissement at the theater, the evening after Catherine
has been denied at Milson St. but has then seen that Eleanor was
at home, Henry tells her that Eleanor “‘has been wishing
ever since to see you, to explain the reason of such incivility’”
(94). Eleanor apparently has told him the whole story, and it
is clear that they are in each other’s confidence. Later,
at Northanger Abbey, when Catherine receives her brother James’s
unhappy letter about breaking it off with Isabella and shows her
distress while reading the letter, Henry and Eleanor discuss her
reaction together before they talk to her about it. And there
is that delightful exchange between them, in which they perfectly
understand each other’s double meaning, although Catherine is
still in the dark. “‘Prepare for your
sister-in-law, Eleanor. . . . Open, candid, artless,
guileless, with affections strong but simple, forming no pretensions,
and knowing no disguise,’” says Henry, mocking Isabella’s
artifice and covertly praising Catherine. “‘Such a
sister-in-law, Henry, I should delight in,’” replies
Eleanor with a smile, responding to both levels of his remark (206).

When
Henry teases Catherine about her careless and inexact use of the
words “amazing” and “nice,” correcting her
use of language, Eleanor tells her that “‘he is treating
you exactly as he does his sister’” (107), suggesting how
Henry has shaped her own education. Eleanor assures Catherine
that, despite his criticism, “‘he must be entirely
misunderstood, if he can ever appear to say an unjust thing of any
woman at all, or an unkind one of me’” (114), a powerful
testimonial of his regard for women in general and for his love of
her in particular. Siblings know one another more intimately
and honestly than anyone else; a sister’s confidence in her
brother’s goodness carries corresponding weight—at least
in eighteenth-century fiction.

Catherine
Morland’s brother James is neither as discerning as Henry
Tilney nor as thoughtful a brother. But he nonetheless loves
his sister sincerely. When she thanks him for coming to Bath to
visit her, he “qualifie[s] his conscience” for
accepting her gratitude by saying, “‘Indeed, Catherine, I
love you dearly’” (51). When Isabella flirts
destructively with Frederick Tilney and breaks off her engagement
with James, he turns piteously to Catherine, telling her that “‘you
are my only friend; your love I do build upon’”
(202). Then he suggests, displaying the family naiveté,
that Catherine may want to leave Northanger Abbey before Frederick
Tilney arrives to announce his engagement with Isabella, so sure is
he that Isabella has captivated the richer man. He writes to
her as a friend, an ally, as one who would naturally share his
feelings. As with the sympathy that Austen creates between
Henry and Eleanor in this novel, Austen’s construction of
brother-sister relations, when they are good, is rather like the
relation between sisters. They talk with one another, they read
the same books, they walk out together, and they confide in one
another. The comfort and genuine love of this relation displays
the moral potential of brothers for being good husbands, and it adds
an important dimension to their qualification as heroes in Austen’s
novels.

Historically,
sibling loyalty played a more important role in people’s lives
than it does today, although by the eighteenth century that
relationship was already somewhat diluted. Still, in
eighteenth-century fiction, only a brother could compete for the love
of a woman with her husband; only a brother could arouse as powerful
feelings as the hero in the sensible heart of a heroine.
Charlotte Lennox’s The Life of Harriot Stuart (1751)
uses a lover’s vocabulary to express the “ardent
affection” of the heroine for her brother, who “instilled
an early love for virtue into my soul.” When he leaves to
make his fortune she hangs “upon his arms in a speechless agony
of grief” (1: 9-10), and when they are reunited, her
“transports” are “unbounded” (1: 57).
Social historians and literary critics often pass over sibling
relationships as irrelevant to the “real story”—which
they assume to be the development of the conjugal family and an
emphasis on romantic love between husbands and wives. They
overlook the extent to which a brother’s protection of his
sister was retained as a moral idea. But the idealized “good”
brother (as well as his opposite) figures prominently in scores of
eighteenth-century novels in the second half of the century.

Mansfield
Park is probably the novel of Austen’s that most privileges
and foregrounds the brother-sister tie. To begin with, Edmund
becomes a kind of brother to Fanny Price when she first arrives.
He notices her reticent grief, learns its source—she is missing
her brothers and sisters, “among whom she had always been
important as play-fellow, instructress, and nurse” (14)—and
helps her write and post a letter to her much loved brother,
William. William is the eldest brother in that overpopulated
Price family, a year older than Fanny, “her constant companion
and friend,” and “her advocate with [their] mother (of
whom he was the darling)” (15). We know instantly from
this detail—of how he uses his male privilege to the advantage
of his sister—that William is a good man. When he visits
her at Mansfield Park, Fanny Price enjoys her greatest happiness in
“unchecked, equal, fearless intercourse” (234) with him;
and indeed it is her virginal but unbounded enthusiasm in his company
that interests Henry Crawford and awakens his desire to woo her.
Their shared memories, claims Austen, were “a strengthener of
love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal”(emphasis added). She continues,

Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first
associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power,
which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long
and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent
connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest
attachments are ever entirely outlived. (234-35)

Thus a
woman’s love for her brother, for his reciprocating affection
and care, can be as strong as any other kind of love, insists Austen;
stronger even than conjugal love.

Many
readers, of course, feel that Edmund Bertram combines the fraternal
and the conjugal, and that makes him the object of Fanny’s love
precisely because he has cared for her like a brother.
From the moment that he finds her crying on the stairs and learns
that she misses her older brother, he acts in loco fratris.
He sharpens her pens and rules “her lines with all the good
will that her brother could himself have felt, and probably with
somewhat more exactness” (16), writes Austen. He also
gives her advice for playing with Maria and Julia, to whom he has
been a brother a lot longer, but a less active one it seems.
During the outing to Sotherton, for example, although Fanny sees
Maria’s flirtation with Henry Crawford, Edmund seems oblivious
of it. And while he recognizes that Mr. Rushworth is a very
stupid fellow, he never tries to counsel his sister Maria—as
their father does—against marrying where wealth seems to be the
primary object. When the plan to put on Lovers’ Vows
is broken to him, he does try to protect Maria from the
indelicacy of acting in it, and he tells her that she must give it up
to set the example to the others. But of course, she does not
heed him. Both Maria and Julia could have benefited from a
closer relation to their brother Edmund, and Austen does not explain
why he never takes responsibility for them as he does for Fanny
Price. Perhaps Edmund is not a particularly attentive brother
to his sisters because there are two of them—and they have each
other—whereas Austen’s other good brothers such as Darcy
or Henry Tilney have only one sister each to cherish and support.

Tom
Bertram, Edmund’s older brother, raised—as eldest sons
usually are—to be expensive and to enjoy himself, and like
Frederick Tilney in Northanger Abbey, lacking responsible
feelings towards anything or anybody, is even less concerned with his
sisters’ well-being or with Fanny’s happiness. His
treatment of these women for whom he should be a champion and a guide
shows how selfish and shallow he is. It is he who insists upon
acting the play despite his sister Maria’s semi-engaged
situation; and as for Fanny, when she is new and awkward at Mansfield
Park he makes her some very pretty presents and laughs at her; and
when she is being celebrated on the occasion of her first ball he
tries to evade dancing with her and then only stands up with her to
foil his aunt Norris’s request that he play cards with the
Grants.

Henry
Crawford is more ambiguous in his role as a brother. He is fond
of his sister Mary, and she of him, but he will not provide her with
an establishment when their uncle, Admiral Crawford, brings in his
mistress after his wife dies, making it impossible for Mary to stay
on there. She could never persuade Henry to settle with her at
his country house although their uncle’s conduct has taken away
her only home. Austen tells us that although Henry “could
not accommodate his sister in an article of such importance,”
he had willingly escorted her into Northamptonshire on this occasion
and was ready “to fetch her away again at half an hour’s
notice, whenever she were weary of the place” (41). They
are friends and understand one another, the Crawfords; but he will
not incommode himself for her. We learn that when they are
apart he never really makes the effort to write to her.

“Henry, . . . who loves me, consults me, confides in
me, and will talk to me by the hour together, has never yet turned
the page in a letter; and very often it is nothing more than, ‘Dear
Mary, I am just arrived. Bath seems full, and every thing as
usual. Your’s sincerely.’” (59).

Fanny
protests that her brother writes long letters, but even
without that comparison, the reader knows that Henry’s laconic
epistolary style is another sign of his selfishness. He does
whatever pleases him but will not take any trouble to comfort or
support his sister when his pleasure is not involved. It does
not bode well for the future, and the reader who imagines that Henry
Crawford is capable of amendment need only recall that he never acts
with disinterested generosity towards his own sister and was unlikely
to put any woman’s interests first.

One
might be inclined to read some of Austen’s representations of
brothers as biographically motivated if it were not for the many
other novels in which a brother’s treatment of his sister
reveals deeper attitudes towards women, compassion for dependents—or
lack thereof—or a man’s true priorities with regard to
wealth and family obligations. As I’ve indicated, the
Chawton household depended on the contributions of Austen’s
brothers for their sustenance. The house itself was granted by
Edward Knight, soon after his wife died, raising the possibility that
the offer to live at Chawton cottage might have been withheld until
then by his wife, the sign of another contest between sisters and a
wife. Moreover, Jane Austen was very close to her
brothers—especially Henry and Frank. And she was very
fond of Edward’s children. These relations remained
strong and important in her life—perhaps because she never
married. But the biographical merely reinforces the historical,
for there are dozens of novels in which a man’s treatment of
his sister tells you everything you need to know about his character
and I have mentioned a few of them here.

Despite
this analysis of the underlying patterns in the depiction of brothers
in Austen’s fiction, it hardly needs saying that she
nevertheless always makes her characters feel like particular
individuals rather than mere types. Although I have focused on
the socio-legal aspect of brother-sister relations and the cultural
ambivalence towards the obligations that followed upon these, we can
see in her novels, as in life, the vivid particularity of the way
these relations played out, the utterly credible humanity with which
she was able to invest even the least of her imagined people—which
is where the most enduring part of her appeal as a novelist has
always lain.

Brothers
and sisters did not have the same power in the world, although they
were equivalent in everything else that mattered socially:
class, birth, mental capability, and genetic endowment. They
were one another’s earliest friends and most important allies
within a family; and it was expected or hoped that brothers would use
their added power to protect and support their sisters—especially
if their fathers could not be counted on to do so. But
increasingly in the eighteenth century as consanguineal ties
weakened, and as the individual’s responsibility towards his
family of origin was attenuated by distance, wealth, custom, and
other emotional ties, it was understood that brothers’ concerns
were not always consonant with their sisters’, and that they
could not be expected to act for their sisters’ advantage when
their own interests were involved. Then they acted like men of
the world, sacrificing their sisters for their own advantage.
Thus, the relation of brothers to their sisters became, in the
fiction of the eighteenth century, another measure of the toll that
individualism paid to modernity, another test of love’s weight
in the scale of self-interest, another casualty of capitalism.

Note

1.
The arguments and examples in this
article—and even some of the sentences—come from chapter
4 of my Novel Relations. But I have elaborated the
argument here and added some new examples to the material of that
earlier treatment.